Cor, it was cold today. Cold, but clear, blue and sunny— wonderfully warm sun. It was warm on my face but its strength was weak, weak but feelable. I suddenly felt a feeling of hope. I felt I could imagine that pin is just around the corner. Yeah, I know we still have january and february to go through first and there can be some very dismal and hopeless-looking days in those two months. Still. I had that feeling today, and hopefully I can infect some of you on here with optimism. Tja, I am waffling on now. What I mean to say is that we went to the lottie to work, and work we did. To begin with, we peeled back some of the mulch on two separate beds, exposing the lovely, protected soil. One place would be where we would take soil from to mix and place in the greenhouse, and the other bed is where we would deposit the soil that we would remove from the greenhouse. So then, the job was to remove the second half of the greenhouse soil and replace it with a mix of garden soil, our compost and well-rotted.manure. This will be for the toms next year. On that piccy above you can see that we are hanging the compost and manure sacks to dry. While outside the greenhouse, you can easily see to where the sun fell upon the mulched beds and where the frost still lay. At home we took the strings of peppers out of the pantry and hung them in one of the bathrooms to finish off drying on the heater. If you look out a window in the stairwell of our building, you get this great view of the waterway work that was done recently. If you recall, there were pics featured on one of my threads taken from a window of the bottom floor of our apartment. This is a much better perspective. The waterway is all ready now for the swans and other water birds that will come in the spring. And don’t forget—spring is on its way.
So nice to be getting the garden ready for next year. Now we have passed the solstice. The days will begin to lengthen. There are cold days ahead, but Spring will follow.
Just tell spring to hurry up as I have seeds to get planted. I think I've over done the ordering but who cares I can hardly wait to get them started.
Good job! I envy you your greenhouse. And your veggie garden. We never know when we'll have spring here. It can be any time from mid-February to May.
I have often wondered why you have not installed a sizeable, heated greenhouse there. It would give you so much more scope to your season. I couldn’t imagine gardening without that small greenhouse of mine.
In January, I start onion and scallion seeds, and hot peppers. The onions do great with the head start and can be set out in a raised bed in March. Hot peppers get a boost from their early start, but need warmth and more light so stay inside until mid May. I wait until April to start tomatoes. This year I started them in March. It was too early - they became too large to care for well, and needed too much care when planted outside. They did well, but I doubt they produced much earlier than if I had waited. I used to use a plant shelf with fluorescent lights. Now I use LED lights and more shelves, and have a sunroom. The sunroom is basically an attached greenhouse, but is also a room of the house. With the short winter days and low intensity of light in winter, the seedlings still need the LED lights to grow healthily, This is the sunroom back in Feb.
Your set-up is very nice @Daniel W . I would love a sun room on what's now a veranda by the living room, facing sout-west. I just have to save up enough to build it. Because to install one of those require a lot of digging, and deep too, and filling that hole with stone, gravel, insulation etc. before putting a greenhouse on top. The frost might go as far down as 80 cm or more if we have one of the horrible winters with very low temps and no snow. And then the heating cost. But we're considering it now. I know where to put it.
@Droopy, you are right, it did cost quite a bit. When I had it built, it was because I was very ill at the time and I wanted a place with sunshine and weather but inside. When I recovered, it turned out to be a nice thing to have. mIt is too hot in summer. Then we hand laundry it to dry. The rest if the year it is very nice. Even in winter it can heat up during the day, so we open the doors to warm the house,
@Daniel W , we have just gone through a remodel of a 54-year-old house, so we'll have to wait a bit for that sunroom. Yours looks very nice indeed. I'm glad you have so much pleasure from it, and that it's useful too, not just pretty. We have five hours of daylight mid-winter, and we never know if we'll get any sun at all for days on end. That goes for all four seasons. As I say, we live here despite the weather, not because of it.
